All Helen Breaks Loose

I get that part of the appeal of The Affair is supposed to be the way it treats all the characters with respect and dramatizes the complexity of the decisionmaking that surrounds fidelity, and infidelity, and how someone in a committed relationship might wrestle with the question of whether to end it in order to be with someone new. But I've been saying for a while that one of my big problems with it is how unbalanced it is in terms of the characters I'm supposed to care about who, in addition to screwing around on their spouses like a couple of fucking shitheads, are not even played by Maura Tierney. But in this week's penultimate episode of the season, Tierney's Helen gets such a scorcher of a moment that I'm starting to wonder if I've had the show wrong this whole time. Does the show hate Noah and Alison too?

Having reunited, in the last episode, after several months' hiatus, Noah and Alison spend most of this week's installment scumbagging around Brooklyn. Since Noah's plans to take Alison to some pretentious hotel in the borough are scuttled by his inability to plan and his lack of access to funds Helen doesn't know about, they end up outside Noah and Helen's brownstone, and even though Alison says she's not going to go inside and Noah says he doesn't intend to fuck her in his wife's bed, GUESS WHAT TWO THINGS OCCUR.

Post-coitally, Noah muses that he could rent a studio to "write" in, and that she could sleep there when she comes to town, and she's pretty happy about that and agrees that his leaving his wife is, in fact, what she wants. But then she sees how far along Noah has actually gotten in his planning -- he's got a place in mind and takes her to see it -- and when he gets more specific about his timeline (he wouldn't even broach the subject of leaving Helen until Whitney goes to college, which is around nine months off), she makes the reasonable inference that he's not actually serious about ending his marriage. She then decides to go with her second-best escape plan: wait for Cherry to sell the ranch, take her half of Cole's share of the proceeds, and start a new life, Athena-style. But then Oscar gives the some bad news about Cherry's sketchy finances; confronting Cherry with what she's learned just ends in a poisonous fight between them, followed by more cutting and a suicide attempt; and in the end, if she's going to be broke, then maybe spending the next two years in a lease in Noah's tiny studio fuck pad isn't so bad? But then Cole catches her up at the train station, having confronted Cherry himself and confirmed that there won't be any windfall from the ranch, and with his own bag packed, ready to leave his old life and follow her wherever she wants to go next. It's a pretty unselfish show of love that HAS to make her reconsider whether what Noah's offering is actually much better than what she already has...RIGHT?! I mean, I certainly wonder if it is!

Meanwhile, as Alison has been burning bridges in Montauk, Noah's getting a reminder that even though it seems like he's living all his penis's hottest fantasies, he does still have real-life responsibilities to attend to. For example: a pregnant teenaged daughter to deal with! The guy who knocked her up to threaten! (Bad call, Scotty Lockhart!) When he goes over to Max's to try to get support for his plans to ditch Helen & Co. for Alison, though, even the divorced guy won't co-sign, and sticks up -- as he should -- for Helen. "You're living some schoolboy fantasy. It's time to grow up. Women are like the stock market. You put your money in a high-performing mutual fund and you leave it alone. You don't pull it out and invest it in some sexy startup! Ninety-nine percent of those companies fail, and you will get fucked. Leave your money where it is. Trust me. I made this mistake. Leave it alone." Granted, the metaphor is kind of unflattering toward both women, but still, Helen's the one who comes out ahead. Also, given what we've seen of her, I'm not sure I'd even describe Alison as a "startup" in this analogy; she had already burned through most of her VC funding and was an empty office cluttered with dusty Aeron chairs by the time Noah met her.)

Then Noah sees a stranger jumping off an adjacent roof. It's a watershed moment that, naturally, disturbs Noah and causes him to line up his priorities in the right order, which is when he marches right home, eavesdrops on Helen comforting Whitney on the eve of her abortion by telling her all about her own, and then tells her she's a good mother...and that he wants to move out: "I don't want this life!" He goes on and on about how he's in love with someone else and wants to be with her and even though he doesn't want to leave right away, he "need[s] to start talking about it."

Helen has already put up with a lot. For the sake of their family, she's tried to get over Noah's affair, even though it's clear that, on a personal level, she considers him gross, and by the way, she's NOT ALONE IN THAT. She's tried to ignore his pissiness about her family's money; she relented when he wanted to go back to Montauk, even though it was against her better judgment and she was definitely right about that too. And now, in the hours after she's learned of Whitney's pregnancy, making this probably the worst week of her adult life SINCE SHE FOUND OUT ABOUT HOW HER HUSBAND HAD BEEN TOTALLY CHEATING ON HER, he decides now is the right time to bring up the possibility of leaving? Also, he thinks he's going to be cute about it, and just gradually ooze out of the house on his slime trail? Oh no, honey. Helen don't play that. Helen's going to start collecting your stuff for you with a quickness and you'd better grab what you can before she tears your throat out for you. Let's start talking about THAT.

For more than half her life, apparently, Helen has tried to make a life with Noah, who's been so disrespectful of her for the crime of still BEING AROUND that he'd bring some other broad to HER HOUSE, give her access to Helen's extremely fancy shampoo...

...leave her unsupervised in Helen's immaculate kitchen with its smart orange and blue accents...

...to wreck up some oil decanter thing (???) (...and yes, I know Noah's recollection of the room is that it's not nearly as perfect...

...but Alison's version is the more oppressively ordered and thus the one I prefer)...and then, on top of ALL OF THAT, she has to find, by accident, when she's in the middle of angrily throwing all of Noah's clothes at him...

...that he fucked this bitch in HELEN'S BED?! ON THE MILLION-THREAD-COUNT SHEETS HER FATHER'S BOOK SALES PAID FOR?!?!??! NO, DUDE, WE'RE NOT GOING TO "START TALKING ABOUT IT": instead, you can GTFO like now, you dumb sack of shit.

Whether or not the show actually wants us to be on Helen's side after this fight, I am. Whether or not she's supposed to be the hero, she's my hero. If she can just get rid of her rotten-ass teenagers, she can start living right.